Rule-O-Matic

The Rules

Genre requirements

Seedlings

Your game must involve caring for something that, for better or worse, is under your guardianship.

Care for a garden, watch children in a daycare, mentor a mentee. The outcome of the game must revolve around the decisions you make and the guidance you give.

Technical requirements

There are two technical requirements:

Text Interactivity

At some point you must interact with the game through written text, either free-form as in text adventures, or a dialog where the player can choose from pre-written responses.

Selecting an option from a menu as part of a title or configuration screen does not count.

Particle Madness

There must be a fairly large particle engine (>500 particles) somewhere in the game.

It does not need to serve any purpose.

Artistic requirements

There are two artistic requirements:

Sound Annoyance

When a player is doing badly, play the most annoying sound ever heard* on a loop. Only doing better or forfeiting will cause the sound to stop.

* Actually, anything obnoxious will do.

Physical Criminality

Your game must have, and flamboyantly reject, an opportunity to obey the laws of physics. For example, you could distort space-time, invert gravity, make a world where it's impossible to create a perpetual motion machine that doesn't keep getting faster and faster, or simply decree that water is flammable. Bonus points if you can make your penchant for illegal behaviour an integral part of a fun game.

Bonus rules

There is one optional bonus rule:

Act of Sequel

Pick a game from any previous Speedhack competition and make a sequel to it! Pick up to two rules in this competition and replace them with rules from that year's competition.

The sequel must share some significant details with the original game: a continuation of the plot, the same characters, etc. It need not be the same genre.

The swapped rules must be in the same category. i.e., An artistic rule must be swapped with an artistic rule. Therefore, it is not possible to swap the Bonus rule for fear of creating a world ending paradox.

If invoking this rule, clearly state in the game's README which rules have been replaced.

Other Important Info

All entries must comply with all requirements except where made void by the Bonus rule.

All entries must be submitted via the online form on or before 12:00 UTC on
Monday 29th of June without fail. All entries must be supplied in a ZIP file
equal to or less than 250 KB in size. All source code, makefiles,
documentation, and references to additional libraries used must be supplied in the
ZIP file. You may optionally attach a second ZIP file of 10 MB with additional
"bonus pack" content. If you choose to supply that, the 250KB ZIP still must fully
implement all rules and be playable as a "light" version.

Your entry must be source compatible with Allegro 4.4 or 5.0 or 5.1.11. You should
consider uploading binaries for people who have problems compiling the source
onto your own website.

If source code is reused from legal sources (your own, GPLed, public domain) you should
declare this and what changes have been made, so that your work can be assessed for the
voting.

People should keep a informative and interesting account of their development through the
competition. This can be sent after the competition for those people with no Internet access
over the weekend. This does not affect your space requirement.

A web-based "blog" update page is available. This will allow spectators to see what is
going on :-)

You can make use of all information sources, mailing lists as you see fit. This is not an exam! :-)